n this podcast, North Korean refugees who visited the University of Bradford share their harrowing experiences of life in North Korea, escape, and the challenges of building new lives in freedom. They are supported by Freedom Speakers International (FSI), a Seoul-based non-profit that helps North Korean refugees rebuild their lives through personalised English education, mentoring and public-speaking opportunities. Crucially, FSI enables refugees to tell their own stories in their own voices.

Their testimony reveals the human cost of repression in North Korea while highlighting the importance of the humanitarian work undertaken by FSI: helping refugees develop the skills and confidence to pursue their ambitions, rebuild their independence and ensure that their experiences are heard internationally.

Freedom Speakers International (FSI) is a Seoul-based non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting North Korean refugees as they rebuild their lives after escape from North Korea. Founded in 2013 by Casey Lartigue Jr. and Eunkoo Lee, it began as Teach North Korean Refugees and has developed into an organisation focused on empowering refugees through education, mentoring and public speaking opportunities.

FSI provides North Korean refugees with tuition-free, individualised English and public-speaking mentorship. This is particularly important because many refugees arrive in South Korea having experienced severe disruption to their education and face significant disadvantages in employment and higher education, where English proficiency can be important. FSI works with refugees according to their own objectives, helping them improve their language skills, confidence and ability to participate fully in South Korean and international society.

An especially important part of FSI's work is enabling North Korean refugees who wish to do so to tell their own stories. Through its public-speaking programme, its “I Am From North Korea” English Speech Contest and its Keynote Speaker Network, FSI gives refugees opportunities to communicate their experiences directly to international audiences rather than having others speak on their behalf. Its speaker network now includes more than 30 speakers.

The humanitarian importance of this work extends well beyond language teaching. North Korean refugees have often endured repression, traumatic journeys of escape, separation from their families and the considerable difficulties of adapting to an unfamiliar society. Effective resettlement therefore requires more than providing physical safety. It also means helping people recover independence, confidence and the ability to determine their own futures. FSI's personalised model is particularly valuable because it treats refugees not simply as recipients of assistance but as individuals with their own ambitions, experiences and voices. Its work helps turn escape from persecution into the possibility of a genuinely independent life.

At the same time, by enabling refugees to speak about North Korea from personal experience, FSI performs a wider human-rights function. First-hand testimony preserves awareness of conditions inside North Korea and ensures that the experiences of those who have escaped remain part of international discussion. Supporting North Korean refugees in finding their own voices is therefore both an important humanitarian activity and a contribution to the broader defence of human dignity and freedom.

Christoph Bluth is Professor of International Relations and Security at the University of Bradford.

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Implementing the Right to Decide Under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Supporting the Legal Capacity of All Persons with Disabilities (Hart, 2025) addresses one of the most controversial questions in contemporary human rights law: how can persons with severe cognitive disabilities make their own decisions?

Historically, vulnerable persons have been considered incapable, and guardians were appointed to represent their interests, which has led to serious abuses. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), adopted in 2006, requires that they receive support to make their own decisions. However, governments claim it is impossible to fully implement this international requirement.

In this book, Dr Janos Fiala-Butora tackles the issue of decision-making from both a legal and theoretical perspective. He explores how supported decision-making could incorporate safeguards to protect the vital interests of vulnerable persons in order to present a viable legal alternative to guardianship. The book accepts that some persons' abilities are very limited, but contends that guardianship is not the appropriate response, even in such cases. Instead, the book presents a unique Modified Support Framework, which can incorporate all persons with disabilities, fulfilling the goals of the CRPD.

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Unwelcome Shores: Black Refugees in America (Rutgers University Press, 2025) is an ethnographic study of the Liberian refugee community in Staten Island, New York, home to the largest per capita concentration of Liberians in the U.S., that sheds light on the racialization of Black refugees and the racism they have experienced at every step of their migration journey. In this pioneering study, sociologist Bernadette Ludwig explores how Liberians have responded to such racist exclusions, noting how members of this community reject the informal refugee label once they are resettled in the United States. Liberian migrants often view the label as a liability since the larger general public, the media, and the U.S. government tend to regard Black refugees as an economic and social burden unworthy of assistance. Indeed, Black refugees’ humanity is often ignored, Ludwig contends, in favor of overemphasizing presumed barbaric violence, endemic wars, cultural backwardness, and diseases. By detailing the lack of aid and support for Black refugees and describing how Liberian refugees in particular have had to overcome various struggles and barriers in coming to the U.S. and while living here, Unwelcome Shores highlights the overarching role of race and anti-Black racism in American society.

Dr. Bernadette Ludwig is a Sociologist and the Assistant Dean of the Macricostas School of Arts and Sciences at Western Connecticut State University. She is also an Affiliated Faculty with The New School's Zolberg Institute on Migration & Mobility. 

Host: Michael L. Rosino is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Molloy University, studying racial politics, media, and democracy. His most recent book, Democracy Is Awkward: Grappling with Racism Inside Grassroots Political Organizing, is now available with the University of North Carolina Press.

In this episode, Dr. Ludwig mentioned an opportunity to get involved in asylum and deportation cases. Here is the link for scholars to submit their information or attend trainings to become country conditions experts.

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There has never been a more promising time for genocide prevention. More resources and research are being focused on prevention than ever before. Yet we still lack vital knowledge as to the most effective ways to stabilise and reduce the risk of genocide in current at-risk societies. Genocide Prevention: An Evidence-Based Approach (Cambridge UP, 2026) offers a compelling new approach: to understand how to prevent genocide, we need to examine societies in which genocide has been prevented. It is in these societies - in which a demonstrably high risk of genocide was present, but in which genocide did not occur - that we can potentially find key factors that promote resilience to genocide. The volume explores six such case studies, spanning three continents and seven decades. Through careful analysis it identifies eleven factors that have contributed to preventing genocide in multiple cases, and which have the potential to inform current approaches to prevention. Collectively, these offer a new, evidence-based approach to preventing genocide.

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Why do some international courts wield broad authority while others face pushback or fade into irrelevance? The Authority of International Courts: A Behavioural Framework (Hart Publishing, 2026) by Dr. Dana Burchardt provides novel theoretical and empirical insights into this question. It offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on the authority of international courts, drawing from law, political science and behavioural research.

It develops, in Part I, a theoretical model and analytical framework for assessing these questions. The model explains how authority relationships between courts and their audiences—such as states, NGOs, individual applicants, and domestic courts—are formed, maintained, or contested. In Part II, the book applies this analytical framework to in-depth case studies of two selected international courts: the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States. These studies not only provide deeper insights into the authority of these courts but also demonstrate how the analytical framework can be applied to other international courts to generate an enhanced understanding of international court authority.

The book sheds new light on why some courts enjoy enduring authority and others face pushback, offering powerful tools for understanding the behaviour of international courts and their audiences.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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The Devil’s Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today (Catapult, 2025) delves into the forgotten history of eugenics and links it to present-day psychiatry to explain how we as a culture continue to get mind care so wrong.

In The Devil’s Castle, Susanne Paola Antonetta weaves a haunting narrative that confronts the darkest chapters of psychiatric history while offering a bold vision for the future of mental health care. In 1939, the eugenics movement growing throughout the West did its worst in Nazi Germany. Through the Aktion T4 euthanasia program, five asylums and an abandoned jail were transformed into gas chambers. Tens of thousands of lives—predominantly adults with neuropsychiatric conditions—were extinguished in those structures, ultimately paving the way for the horrors of the Holocaust.

Interlacing her experiences of psychosis with the complex history of psychiatry, Antonetta sheds light on the intersections of madness and societal perceptions of mental difference. She brings to life the stories of Paul Schreber and Dorothea Buck, two historical figures who act as models for mind care and acceptance. This gripping exploration traverses the spectrum of neurodiversity, from the devastating consequences of dehumanization to the transformative potential of understanding and acceptance.

With The Devil’s Castle, Antonetta not only unearths the failures of our past, but also envisions a more compassionate, enlightened approach to consciousness and mental health care. This is a story of tragedy, resilience, and hope—a rallying cry for change that dares to challenge the limits of how we define and support the human mind.

Susanne Paola Antonetta is the author of The Devil's Castle: Eugenics, Nazi Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Hurts Us Now. She is also the author of The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, Make Me a Mother, Entangled Objects, Body Toxic, A Mind Apart, and four books of poetry. Her awards include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, an Amazon Best Memoir of the Year award, and others. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ms., The Huffington Post, The UK Independent, The Hill, Orion, Psychology Today, and The New Republic and have been featured on CNN as well as the CBC Ideas documentary series. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

For more information about her work please visit her website here and sign up for notifications about her regular contributions to Psychology Today.

Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher in Massachusetts. You can follow her on Instagram, Insight Timer, YouTube (@drelizabethcronin) or visit her website.

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The United States has traditionally been a great promoter of international justice – forging the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals after World War II and leading the way in creating tribunals to address genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda after the Cold War. Yet the US views the International Criminal Court – the culmination of the tribunal-building process – as a dire threat.

The US voted against its establishment, passed legislation threatening to invade The Hague, and tried to destroy the ICC with economic sanctions. Delving into the uneasy relationship between the world's superpower and one of its most prominent international institutions,

Above the Law: The United States and the International Criminal Court (Cambridge UP, 2026) explains how the desire to shield American soldiers from unwanted ICC scrutiny is the ultimate source of tension. Offering a sophisticated analysis of the ICC's track record that shows how American fears are overblown, Daniel Krcmaric argues that a more cooperative US policy toward the ICC would benefit both sides.

Our guest is Daniel Krcmaric, an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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A memoir of a child’s forced relocation to Siberia under Stalin’s Gulag system reveals the potential for true human kindness in the face of extraordinary hardship.

In April of 1940, six-year-old Ida woke to the sound of pounding on her door. Soviet soldiers forcibly packed her and her mother onto a train with thousands of their neighbors and deported them to remote Siberia, leaving them stranded to survive the brutal winter in subhuman conditions. Looking back, Ida shares their struggles: foraging for food, trying to reunite with her imprisoned father, spending weeks in a desolate hospital with typhoid fever, and adapting to shifts in the political climate to make the long journey home to Poland.

Ida published this acclaimed memoir in her native Polish in 2011. Here, Ida’s granddaughter, Isabella Skrypczak, translates her babcia’s words and provides additional context—including describing the remarkable life Ida has gone on to live as a pioneering doctor.

In the vein of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile (Disruption Books, 2026) chronicles Ida’s experiences on a lesser-known front of the Second World War. Together, Ida and Isabella reflect on how every small act of kindness contributed to Ida’s liberation from exile and ability to build a life and a family. Her story celebrates the capacity of the human spirit to not only survive trauma but thrive beyond it.

Ida Kinalska-Pietruska survived childhood exile to Siberia during the Soviet Union’s World War II assault on Poland. When she returned to Poland as a teen, she began studying medicine. A pioneering endocrinologist, she founded the School of Endocrinology and Diabetology in Białystok and led the region’s first endocrinology clinic for twenty years. Ida has authored more than four hundred publications, mentored countless other doctors, and collaborated across the international medical community, including using her research to make widely known the Chernobyl disaster’s effects on people’s endocrinological health. She has been honored with the Order Odrodzenia Polski, Poland’s second-highest civilian state award, and two Doctor Honoris Causa titles, reflecting her resilience, brilliance, and global impact on science and humanity.

Isabella Skrypczak is an author, intuitive healer, and former HR professional in Big Tech whose work bridges the seen and unseen. Born to Polish immigrants and raised in Houston, Texas, she spent every summer with her grandmother in Poland. When her grandmother’s memoir gained national attention in Polish media, Iza felt called to translate it into English—an act of love, remembrance, and advocacy. As war returned to Eastern Europe, she recognized the urgency in sharing this history with the Western world. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her daughter, Kamila.
Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.

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